Because a community is more than just people

Dear Readers, a pair of stately holm oaks stand outside Dad’s nursing home in Dorchester. I remember being surprised by them on the very first day that Mum and Dad arrived, and thinking that I had never seen an evergreen oak before. Little did I know that the south west of England is a hotspot for this plant. It comes originally from the Mediterranean, and was one of the southern European trees planted on the Mamhead Estate in Devon by Sir Thomas Balle, who also introduced ‘cork, ilex, wainscot, oak, Spanish chestnut, acacia, and other species of exotic trees’ (Britton and Bayley ‘The Beauties of England and Wales’ (1803)). It is now seen as a dangerous alien invader which is accused of damaging biodiversity. In theory, it is not fully frost hardy, and so shouldn’t be able to get too far north. However, with climate change it has recently popped up as far north as Cumbria.

There is a high concentration of holm oaks around St Boniface Down near Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, and on the coastal sand dunes near Holkham in Norfolk. Both of these are vulnerable habitats but, as the acorns are spread by jays, rooks and grey squirrels, who bury them to provide sustenance during the winter, it’s difficult to see how they can be completely controlled. The big danger is in that extensive, evergreen canopy, which shades out other plants. There is, however, a DEFRA plan in place to keep an eye on the spread of the species and to take action as necessary. In ‘Alien Plants‘ by Clive Stace and Michael Crawley, it’s noted that holm oak also spreads along the side of railway lines, probably being buried in the soil of the embankments by those pesky squirrels.

There are also two holm oaks featured in ‘The Great Trees of London‘ by Jenny Landreth, one in Fulham Palace Gardens and one in Valence Park in Beacontree, not far from where I used to live.

There are two subspecies of holm oak: one has bitter acorns, and grows from northern Spain and France to Greece, and the other has sweet acorns and grows in southern Spain and North Africa. These can be very long-lived trees: the ones on the Mamhead Estate are still there after over two hundred years, and there is a grove of the trees in Malta that are said to be between 500 and a thousand years old. The tree can grow to massive size, with one in County Wexford in ireland being over 20 metres tall with a spread of 43 metres. These are fine trees, with dense shade from the holly-like leaves (which is what gives the tree its name – ‘holm’ is an old word for ‘holly’). I imagine that people will enjoy sitting on the seat under the pair beside the nursing home once the weather gets warmer. As the nursing home used to be a maternity hospital, I can also imagine people pushing their prams into the welcoming coolness of the shade.

In its native regions, holm oak is one of several trees that are used in the creation of truffle orchards or truffieres. The tree has an association with the mycorrhizal fungus which produces truffles as its fruiting body, whilst the fungal ‘roots’ help to increase the amount of moisture and nutrients that the tree can extract from the poor, drought-prone soil that it grows on. Back in 1790 a Frenchman named Pierre II Mauleon decided to try planting acorns from oak trees which were known to have hosted truffles. It takes some 7-10 years for the fungus and the tree to establish themselves, but Monsier Mauleon was patient, and his experiment was eventually successful. In the nineteenth century, much of the area where the Phylloxera virus had destroyed the grapevines was turned, instead, to truffle production. Today, truffles are grown in many parts of the world, although the connoisseur considers that the Perigord truffle is the best of the bunch. Personally, I find that a little truffle goes a very long way (which is just as well considering how expensive it is).

Black Perigord truffle (Public Domain)

The acorns from holm oak are food for the free-range black Iberian pig, and is said to be one of the elements that flavours their meat. Jamon iberico, a distinctive ham, can be produced only from this breed of pig, and is always produced from wild-foraging animals.

Iberian pigs (Photo One)

The wood from holm oak is hard and tough, and has been used in the manufacture of everything from wagons (as described by Hesiod back in 700 BCE ) to wine vessels. It is also used for charcoal and firewood in its native range.

Holm oak is also very amenable to being used for hedging, and for pruning into formal shapes. The Armed Forces Memorial in Staffordshire is surrounded by 50 holm oaks which have been pruned into cylindrical shapes, echoing the tumulus-like design of the memorial itself, which honours over 16,000 servicemen and women who have been killed in the line of duty since the end of the Second World War.

Armed Forces Memorial in Staffordshire (Photo Two)

It is, of course, impossible for me to divorce this particular tree from the memories that I have of the nursing home, of Mum’s last days and of my Dad’s rapidly deterioration due to vascular dementia. The two trunks remind me of what a pigeon pair Mum and Dad were, and how lost Dad often seems without her. And so, this poem by Stevie Smith, included in her final collection before her death, seems particularly fitting, in its simplicity and lack of sentimentalism.

Yep, it’s that time of year again. My pond is full of hooligans singing all night and having sex. Of course, the male frogs have been here all along, resting in the mud at the bottom of the pond. The females generally spend the winter elsewhere, in crevices between the stones or under the oak sleepers that make up the steps down to the bottom part of the garden (there’s more than a metre drop between the back of the house and the end of my plot). But come spring, the water is full of hopeful little faces.

I am a great admirer of frogs’ legs. They are just built for jumping, and have all the elegance of those of a ballet dancer. Whenever I have held a frog (usually when rescuing it from an over-curious cat or trying to remove it from an area of heavy foot-traffic) I have been surprised by how strong they are – all that pent-up energy in that clammy little body. Incidentally, amphibians generally don’t like being handled because it damages their delicate skin, whereas lizards and snakes, if used to humans, seem to quite enjoy the warmth that they borrow from our bodies.

As usual there seem to be more males than females, which can lead to the females being rather more popular than is optimal for their well-being. I have heard of so many males attaching themselves to a female that she drowns. My pond is not quite that much of a free-for-all, but there are a few menage a trois where I’m sure the female would rather be in a pair.

I think this is probably why this pair were out of the pond, sitting on the sidelines. The male has little say in the matter, but actually I am a bit worried about him – he seems to have blisters on his back which are hopefully just frogspawn but could also be herpes – this is not transmittable to humans, and doesn’t appear to harm the animal (except for marring his exceptional good looks). He also looks rather bloated but it might be that he just puffed himself up to sing, or he may be suffering from a hormonal imbalance that causes water to flow into his body. This also seems to right itself over time. For anyone wondering how I have suddenly become a frog veterinarian, the Froglife website has the answer to every frog question that has ever occurred to me.

The female is an extraordinary shade of chestnut – common frogs come in a wide range of colours, but this is exceptional.

I am giving my pond a bit of a squinty look this year, and trying to decide how much of a clear-out to give it in autumn. Last year it was completely neglected, what with Mum and Dad being so sick and all, and although we have done a bit of a tidy up of the reeds and other peripheral plants, I know that the water-lilies need dividing and there must be a fair bit of ‘stuff’ on the bottom. As it’s nearly a metre deep I’m going to need some waders for sure. Anybody else out there with a pond? I’d love to know what your routine is.

I remember how excited I was when the pond was first filled with water back in 2011. First it went green overnight. Then a host of midges suddenly appeared. And then, three days after it was built, I heard a ‘plop’ and there was my first frog. Where on earth had s/he come from? As far as I know there is not a water feature for half a mile. According to Froglife, if there are ponds within a 1000 metre radius they should turn up of their own accord, so I guess that’s what happened. Also, frogs normally only spend the breeding season in water, and the rest of the time hiding in vegetation or compost heaps, so the whole area could have been alive with frogs just waiting for some water to turn up.

Froglife also say that garden ponds are often now the most important redoubts of the common frog. Agricultural ponds and waterways are often polluted with nitrates and phosphates, and although frogs aren’t as sensitive to this as the common toad, they much prefer cleaner water. I love the thought of the pond hosting another generation of frogs, and I must say that it has brought me as much pleasure as anything I’ve done in the garden, for all the wrestling with duckweed and blanket weed over the years. If you have any room in the garden, and are wondering what to do this year, I would recommend popping in a pond. You never know who is going to turn up!

Dear Readers, there are some garden shrubs that only come into their own on a sunny day, when the light illuminates their flowers as if they were little lanterns. I confess that I rarely gave Berberis a second look until last week, when it was positively glowing. This particular one, in Fortis Green, was laden down with flowers on a cold February day. Later in the year, it will produce small purple berries, and its evergreen foliage is attractive all year round.

The plant was indeed ‘discovered’ by Darwin in South America, during the voyage of The Beagle in 1835. It had been known by the indigenous people of Patagonia since prehistoric times, however: they used the berries as a valuable autumn food source. It was soon a popular garden plant, but in some places it has become something of a threat to indigenous ecosystems: in New Zealand, it is listed on the National Pest Plant Accord, where it joins a whole gang of ‘thugs’ such as pendulous sedge and rhododendron.

One way to tackle an invasive plant is, of course, to eat it. The Wilderness blog recommends turning the berries into a jelly to eat with cold meat or cheese. The berries of Berberis vulgaris are what we buy as barberry in Middle Eastern delicatessens, and they have a startlingly sour flavour – if you’ve been cooking from the books of Yotam Ottolenghi you’ll find that they crop up all over the place.

The berries are also popular with birds, as seen in this painting by Jacques le Moynes de Morgues, a French artist who travelled to the New World in the sixteenth century and returned with exquisite pictures of the flora, fauna and people that he found there.

The plant is a member of the Berberidaceae family, which includes 18 genera and about 700 species, the most familiar of which are the mahonias. Many berberis are spiny, which makes them a popular choice, along with pyracantha, for municipal hedging. However, historically berberis was seen as a problematic choice by farmers: the plant can harbour a rust fungus that also infects wheat. The UK has a native berberis, Berberis vulgaris, which was a popular hedgerow plant until this link was discovered in the nineteenth century. The shrubs were grubbed up, taking away the sole foodplant of a native moth, the barberry carpet moth (Pareulype berberata). By the 1980’s the moths were reduced to a single site, and it seemed likely that they would become extinct. The story has a happy ending, however: captive populations of the moth were maintained, and, when rust-resistant wheat was developed and the shrubs were replanted, these were released into the wild again. The Barberry Highways Group consists of various organisations (including Dudley and Bristol Zoo, Butterfly Conservation and British Waterways) who are working together to restore the habitat of this vanishingly rare creature. Unfortunately, the caterpillars of this moth show little interest in the tough leaves of ‘our’ berberis , and are inextricably linked to the fortunes of Berberis vulgaris. Let’s hope that its population continues to grow. If you want to read more about the conservation effort involved in protecting this species, there is a paper here which makes for a most interesting read.

Berberis vulgaris flowers (Photo One)

An adult Barberry Carpet Moth (Pareulype berberata) (Photo Two)

Barberry carpet moth caterpillars (Public Domain)

Incidentally, another rare moth, the Scarce Tissue Moth (Hydria cervinalis) has taken a shine to Darwin’s Barberry, and is well worth watching out for.

Scarce Tissue moth (Hydria cervinalis) ( PhotoThree)

All berberis species contain a compound called Berberine, which is considered to have antibacterial properties, especially for the urinary system and for dysentary. The root is said to be useful as a tonic, and also provides a bright yellow dye, which has been used to colour leather and tint hair.

And a poem, by Rainer Maria Rilke no less. This is about the common barberry with its red berries, but still. I think that it is a kind of plea to live fully, not to ‘die before you die’. Let me know what you think, gentle readers.

Already ripening barberries grow red,

Already ripening barberries grow red,the aging asters scarce breathe in their bed.Who is not rich, with summer nearly done,will never find a self that is his own.

Who is unable now to close his eyes,certain that many visages withinwait slumbering until night shall beginand in the darkness of his soul will rise,is like an aged man whose strength is gone.

Nothing will touch him in the days to come,and each event will cheat him and betray,even you, my God. And you are like a stone,that draws him to a lower depth each day.

Dear Readers, as far as many invertebrates are concerned, our homes are just big warm caves. Lots of species will hibernate with us: butterflies such as peacocks will often sleep the winter away in our lofts and garden sheds, and ladybirds, especially the newly arrived harlequin species, will occupy cracks and crevices in enormous numbers. But until I saw this one I had forgotten that some species of lacewing also spend the cold months tucked up in our houses. This one attracted the attention of my cat, and she chattered and jumped about until I realised that there was something to get excited about. I managed to get a few photographs while the poor insect waved its long antennae and gave every appearance of being nervous.

Lacewings are members of the Neuroptera, or ‘nerve-wing’ family, which also contains predators such as antlions and mantidflies. The ‘nerve-wing’ refers to the tracery of veins in those elegant wings.

I have always been partial to lacewings: I love their red-gold eyes, which are super-tuned to the colour green, enabling them to find just the right fresh growth on which to lay their delicate eggs. These eggs are laid over a period of nights, with 2 to 5 eggs being deposited at a time, until her entire cache of several hundred eggs has been distributed.

Lacewing eggs (Photo One)

The eggs soon hatch into one of the most ferocious-looking larvae in the insect world. A single larva can eat up to 10,000 aphids during its lifetime, and it has been used for biological control in glasshouses, as it will eat mealybug and white fly with equal enthusiasm. It can consume entire colonies of aphids, but is not immune to a spot of cannibalism if the greenfly run out. Although the larva has poor sight and hearing, they are very sensitive to touch: they walk up and down the stems of plants swaying their head from side to side until they encounter an unsuspecting aphid, which is seized in those impressive jaws. The larva then injects the unfortunate prey with a digestive chemical so strong that the internal organs of the bug are liquidised within 90 seconds. A lacewing larva is the kind of creature that makes me glad that I am nearly six feet tall and that it is only the size of my little finger nail.

Green lacewing larva (Photo Two)

Adult lacewings flitter about, eating nectar and honeydew, and attempting to attract a mate. They have excellent hearing, and have been found to use this to detect the hunting calls of bats and to drop out of the sky to avoid being eaten. In Bugs Britannica by Peter Marren and Richard Mabey, it mentions that one way to catch a lacewing that you want to remove is to put your hand a few inches underneath the insect and to then wave your hand close to the lacewing. The insect should just fall into your hand and remain quiet for a few moments so that it can be released.

To find a suitable partner, they use a technique called ‘tremulation’ – they vibrate their abdomens, and these tremors pass through the ground and alert any available single lacewings in need of a mate. Both male and female will take part in a duet, which is described by the Royal Entomological Society as ‘an essential prerequisite to mating’.

Although lacewings look so elegant, they have the alternative name of ‘stinkflies’, because of their habit of excreting if handled (and who can blame them). At least adult lacewings are able to excrete: larvae, for some evolutionary reason, are lacking a functioning anus, and so they save up all their excreta until they moult for the last time, and then produce a single gigantic poo. Who knew? Apparently Neuroptera experts can identify the species from this pile of excrement, and good luck to them.

There are 43 species of lacewings in the UK, and, whilst the green lacewing is the one that we’re all most familiar with, there is a giant lacewing (Osymlus fulvicephalus) that loves damp, neglected corners of the garden, of which I have a superabundance at the moment. It is also very fond of willowherb, which I also have. I shall be keeping an eye open to see if I can spot this floppy-winged critter and will report back if I have any luck.

Giant lacewing (Osymlus fulvicephalus) (Photo Three)

What a splendid creature the lacewing is! From those elegant eggs through the ferocious larva to the golden-eyed adult, it is fascinating at every stage. It is very welcome to share my house during the winter, and to deposit lots of little larvae all over the plants in the garden in spring.

Dear Readers, this week I had a lesson in ‘seizing the day’. Last week I spotted a patch of pink sorrel in bloom in a front garden in Muswell Hill . I hadn’t seen it around here before, though it isn’t an uncommon plant.

‘Hah’, I thought, ‘I’ll pop back and take a photo of that when I get a second’.

Well, the days went past and when I revisited on Saturday not only were the flowers gone but the house owner was cheerfully pulling the plant up because ‘it gets everywhere’. Still, there were some leaves left and I find them very sweet, with their three sets of hearts joined in the middle. Those leaves are a sign that the plant is a member of the Oxalidaceae, or wood sorrels – we have already met one member of the family, procumbent yellow sorrel (Oxalis corniculata) and I hold out hope for my favourite plants, wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella).

Incidentally, although the plant is known as ‘pink shamrock’ in some places in the UK, it is not closely related to the ‘true’ shamrock, which is a variety of clover.

More pink sorrel leaves

Pink sorrel comes originally from South America, and made its debut in the UK in a garden setting in 1870. By 1912 it was off and running. As it reproduces by a variety of methods, including seeds, runners and bulbils, it is often introduced to gardens in the compost surrounding other more desirable garden plants and vegetable seedlings. As the plant is acid-tolerant it can also thrive in areas where other flowers find it difficult to get a foot (root) hold. I can see that it could rapidly run amok, but when you see it in bloom it’s difficult to be deeply annoyed with it.

Oxalis in flower (Photo One)

You might wonder why this delicate woodland species is called sorrel, when there is also a heftier plant that shares the name (Rumex acetosa). The reason is that the leaves of both have a lemony taste, and the word ‘sorrel’ comes from the Germanic word ‘sur’, meaning ‘sour’. One alternative name for sorrel is ‘sour grass’. Lots of people seem to eat the plant, in salads, as a stuffing, or, as here, as the basis for a refreshing drink. If you do eat it you could be doing yourself a favour: the leaves are also rich in Vitamin C, and one species, known as ‘scurvy-grass sorrel’ (Oxalis enneaphylla), was eaten by sailors in South America to prevent scurvy.

The ‘other’ sorrel, Rumex acetosa (Photo Two)

A Bolivian species, Oxalis tuberosa has particularly tasty and swollen roots, known as ‘Oca’, and eaten in a manner similar to Jerusalem artichokes (though hopefully without the somewhat windy side effects).

Tubers of the Oca (Oxalis tuberosa) (Photo Three)

Part of the reason for the ‘refreshing’ flavour of the leaves and flowers is the presence of oxalic acid, for which the genus is named. Lots of plants contain this compound, including spinach, rhubarb and broccoli, and, while it is toxic to humans you would need to eat a huge amount of the leaves in order to experience any ill effects. In fact, crystals of calcium oxalate used to be extracted from the plant for medicinal purposes, and also to produce a salt with a lemony flavour, known as ‘sorrel salt’.

Some species of Oxalis are apparently strongly attracted to copper in the soil, and a Ming Dynasty text from 1421 describes how dispersing the seed of the plant over a wide area would give an indication of where deposits of the mineral could be found.

According to the Doctrine of Signatures, plants in the Oxalis family are good for the heart because of the shape of those leaves.

And now, a poem. This one has a only passing mention of Oxalis, but I loved it so much that I wanted you to have a chance to read it too. The man to whom it is dedicated, Czeslaw Milosz (1911 to 2004), was a Polish poet who also saw himself as Lithuanian and a man instrumental in helping Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Poland (for which he received the medal for ‘The Righteous Among the Nations’ in Yad Vashem, Israel). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 and wrote extensively against totalitarianism and prejudice. When he died, there was resistance to his being buried in Krakow Cathedral because of, among other things, his support for the rights of gays and lesbians. In other words, he was a man of conscience who used his writing and his life to support what he felt was right.

The poet Robert Hass is no slouch himself, having translated Milosz’s work, along with that of the Japanese haiku masters Basho and Issa. I love this poem for its breadth, and for the moments of stillness that it contains, much as after a haiku, there is a kind of opening, a silence.

The fog has hovered off the coast for weeks
And given us a march of brilliant days
You wouldn’t recognize-who have grumbled
So eloquently about gray days on Grizzly Peak-
Unless they put you in mind of puppet pageants
Your poems remember from Lithuanian market towns
Just after the First World War. Here’s more theater:
A mule-tail doe gave birth to a pair of fawns
A couple of weeks ago just outside your study
In the bed of oxalis by the redwood trees.
Having dropped by that evening, I saw,
Though at first couldn’t tell what I was seeing,
A fawn, wet and shivering, curled almost
In a ball under the thicket of hazel and toyon.
I’ve read somewhere that does hide the young
As best they can and then go off to browse
And recruit themselves. They can’t graze the juices
In the leaves if they stay to protect the newborns.
It’s a glitch in engineering through which chance
And terror enter on the world. I looked closer
At the fawn. It was utterly still and trembling,
Eyes closed, possibly asleep. I leaned to smell it:
There was hardly a scent. She had licked all traces
Of the rank birth-smell away. Do you remember
This fragment from Anacreon?-the context,
Of course, was probably erotic: ” . . . her gently,
Like an unweaned fawn left alone in a forest
By its antlered mother, frail, trembling with fright.”
It’s a verse-you will like this detail-found
In the papyrus that wrapped a female mummy
A museum in Cairo was examining in 1956.
I remembered the time a woman in Portland
Asked if you were a reader of Flannery O’Connor.
You winced regretfully, shook your head,
And said, “You know, I don’t agree with the novel.”
I think you haven’t agreed, in this same sense,
With life, never accepted the cruelty in the frame
Of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster,
And the smell of summer grasses in the world
That can hardly be named or remembered
Past the moment of our wading through them,
And the world’s poor salvation in the word. Well,
Dear friend, you resisted. You were not mute.
Mark tells me he has seen the fawns grazing
With their mother in the dusk. Gorging on your roses-
So it seems they made it through the night
And neither dog nor car has got to them just yet.

Dear Readers, while London has many splendid Royal Parks and city squares, the City of London itself can feel like something of a desert to those of us who enjoy the hum of bees and the whispering of the breeze. Furthermore, some of the sites that sound enticing, such as the Sky Garden in the ‘Walkie Talkie’ building, are completely enclosed, and require pre-booking. I remember visiting this site and being extremely disappointed: the public were promised a garden (indeed, this feature was what finally got the planning permission for the building granted) , and instead they got, in the words of Oliver Wainwright, the architecture critic of The Guardian, ‘a meagre pair of rockeries, in a space designed with all the finesse of a departure lounge’.

So, it’s fair to say that I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for the new Roof Garden just along the road at 120 Fenchurch Street. First signs were promising: there is, of course, security in place (bags are X-rayed), but then a lift whooshes you up to the fifteenth floor, without any id or pre-booking required. The lift doors open, and there you are.

One of the views from the Garden at 120 Fenchurch Street

This place is all about the angles. It is a mass of triangles. The water feature zig-zags eastwards towards views of Canary Wharf and the building work around Whitechapel.

Toddle round a bit further and the Gherkin appears. This building has gone from ‘unsightly’ to ‘icon’ in the space of fifteen years, and indeed it now seems elegant and modest compared with some of the other skyscrapers that are being thrown up.

The Gherkin

And indeed you can see the Sky Garden from here. I rather like the perspective that fifteen floors gives you as opposed to thirty-six.

The Walkie Talkie

But what, I hear you ask, of the garden? Well, there are actually plants, and there is much about the design to like. I love the effect of the wooden shuttering on the concrete, for example – it reminds me of the same effect in Sir Denys Lasdun’s South Bank Centre, but here the concrete is a soft cream colour. I think it will look very fine when the myriad of vines have grown up. The concrete itself is covering the services and plant for the building, and has the effect of breaking the roof garden up into smaller, more intimate areas.

There are some plants in flower already, and I see a lot of bulbs just waiting to pop.

Euphorbia

Astrantia and narcissi

Japanese anemone

Persicaria

There are a healthy number of species geraniums, which will be great for pollinators later in the year.

There are also rafts of ferns and ornamental grasses.

And there is a whole area of low hedging which echoes the angles of the pergolas. I am a little miffed at the waste of an opportunity to provide more plants for pollinators in this space, but then I am a bit monomaniacal on the subject, as regular readers will know. I will be interested to see if bees actually do pop up to this height once they discover that there’s food available, and will have to revisit in the early summer when things have grown up a bit. As a study found that bumblebees are quite happy at heights of 3250 metres in the mountains of Sichuan in China I’d have thought that a mere 15 floors would be well within their range, provided there’s an incentive.

Low hedging with the Lloyd’s Building in the background

Wisteria is being encouraged to climb the struts of the pergolas, and very pretty it will be too once they get going. At the moment I quite like the starkness of the design, but plants will soon change all those sharp angles to something softer and more natural.

So, I am cautiously optimistic about The Garden at 120 Fenchurch Street. It is an exposed site, but because it is broken into ‘rooms’ by the concrete there will be a little more protection for the plants. I am sad that it isn’t a little more wildlife friendly, but it is not all about human convenience either. It is certainly a fine place to visit if you are in the City, and at some point a swish restaurant will open on the fourteenth floor in case all that ‘fresh’ London air makes you hungry. When I went, at 10 a.m. on a cloudy Thursday, the security staff outnumbered the visitors, and were very happy to chat. Apparently the place has been overrun with bloggers (I seem to have become part of an infestation), but the time to avoid is between 12 and 2, when everyone pops up for their lunch, although they aren’t supposed to. I don’t blame them – this would be a magnificent spot for a sandwich on a sunny day. I shall definitely revisit later in the year to see how the garden is getting on.

Opening hours are currently between 10 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. until 31st March, when the evening opening times are extended to 9 p.m. There will soon be a coffee hut for any caffeine addicts. They are also currently trialling weekend opening from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Total capacity of the garden is only 207 people, so I expect that there will be queues when the weather is good, especially in the evening. If you want to see how busy it is, you can have a look here, which is rather cool.

Dear Readers, I was in Somerset this week visiting my 91 year-old Aunt Hilary. Her garden really is a delight – at the moment it is absolutely full of cyclamen, but I have already waxed lyrical about them here, and here, so I have turned to the more subtle delights of this little fern. Maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes) is in the same genus as another common fern of these parts, hart’s tongue fern, but this plant is an altogether shyer character. It is easily identified by the delicate lozenge-shaped leaflets emerging from the jet black stems. Many ferns are known as spleenworts, because it was thought that the spores, which appear on the underside of the leaves, resembled the shape of the spleen. Under our old friend the Doctrine of Signatures, this was believed to mean that God was posting a message on the plant about how it could be used by humans.

Walls are a very special habitat, and only a few plants have learned the art of surviving on them. There is very little soil for the roots to anchor themselves in, nutrients are scarce, and, depending on whereabouts on the wall you germinate, it can be very dark or very exposed. Water too may be ever present (at the bottom of a shady wall) or very transient. All in all, wall-living plants have to be resilient and well-adapted.

Maidenhair spleenwort is happy growing in any kind of substrate (see below) and it also likes the damp, shadier conditions of a north-facing wall. The plant that I was admiring has a couple of relatives hiding close by. It all looks very Victorian somehow, the Victorians being great pteridophiles.

The spores of the plant are produced on the underside of special leaves called sporophylls (a normal leaf that produces sugars via photosynthesis is called a trophophyll). I love the spores of ferns, they have a kind of geometrical precision that delights me.

Spores of a maidenhair spleenwort (Photo One)

The story of the maidenhair spleenwort is rather more complicated than you might think, however. For a start, it is a true ‘citizen of the world’. It is native to every continent except Antarctica, and it has evolved to have a variety of different subspecies, each with a different ‘lifestyle’. One subspecies, Asplenium trichomanes trichomanes prefers acidic rocks such as basalt and sandstone, and is found mainly in mountainous northern areas in Europe and North America. Another, Asplenium trichomanes quadrivalens, prefers alkaline rocks such as limestone and will grow in mortar, so I suspect that this is ‘our’ plant. It is much commoner in Europe than in North America. Majorca, Madeira and the Azores also have their own subspecies of the plant. Furthermore, where the subspecies intermingle they can also hybridise. I suspect that botanists who specialise in ferns will have plenty of work sorting that lot out for generations to come.

It just goes to show that some supposedly ‘primitive’ and simple plants have staggeringly complicated backstories, just as it’s often the quietest and most self-effacing people who have lived the most extraordinary lives.

The Plant Lives website describes how, in North America, maidenhair spleenwort was used by the Native American Hopi tribe as part of their rain-making rituals – the plant was soaked in water, and the water was then painted onto prayersticks. For the Cherokee people, the plant had many medicinal uses, including for liver and uterine problems, and was also used to make cough mixture. In County Cavan in Ireland, the plant was boiled with honey and oatmeal as a cure for dysentery.

In Slavic folklore, it was believed that anyone who found a ‘fern flower’ would be happy and rich for the rest of their lives. The fern was believed to flower only once a year, on Midsummer’s Eve. As ferns are not flowering plants I fear that the search for a bloom would have been in vain although maybe the hunt provided an opportunity for young people to go off into the woods on their own on this magical shortest night of the year.

Now, as you know, this blog takes me to some fascinating and unlikely places. This week, it’s taken me to the paintings of Gerard David (1460 to 1523), a Netherlandish painter who was renowned for his use of colour. However, he was also a painter of extraordinarily detailed plants, which often seem to pop up everywhere amidst his portraits of religious figures. One of his paintings, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, features two ferns including Maidenhair Spleenwort growing out of the wall behind Mary and Joseph.

Detail from ‘The Nativity with Donors and Saints Jerome and Leonard’ by Gerard David (1515) (Photo Two)

‘While the setting of the painting could simply depict the common state of stone buildings during the Middle Ages, I believe it also demonstrates a love for the bucolic, ramshackle idyll of nature. This same sentiment is witnessed in the modern Gothic folly (an ornamental building with no practical use), or in a recreated medieval ruin set amidst a garden. Then, perhaps even more than now, weedy or opportunistic species like ferns and dandelions were much appreciated. The artist’s careful attention to the ferns softened the setting and emphasized how much the medieval world was fundamentally connected with plants.

And here is the entire triptych:

‘The Nativity with Donors and Saints Jerome and Leonard by Gerard David (1515) (Public Domain)

And finally, a poem. As you might expect, the canon is not exactly snowed under with poems that specifically mention the maidenhair spleenwort, but my search for the mention of ferns in general has brought me to Theodore Roethke, an American poet who had his problems with mental health and alcoholism but who wrote some of my very favourite poems. Here is an excerpt from his 1948 poem ‘A Field of Light’. It seems to me to conjure that ecstatic feeling that I sometimes get when I’m walking in nature, alone, on a late spring morning. See what you think.

A Field of Light by Theodore Roethke The dirt left my hand, visitor.
I could feel the mare’s nose.
A path went walking.
The sun glittered on a small rapids.
Some morning thing came, beating its wings.
The great elm filled with bird.

Listen, love,The fat lark sand in the field;I touched the ground, the ground warmed by the killdeer,The salt laughed and the stones;The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards,And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,The lovely diminutives.I could watch! I could watch!I saw the separateness of all things!My heart lifted up with the great grasses;The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak of cedars,And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.The worms were delighted as wrens.And I walked, I walked through the light air;I moved with the morning.